Israel's Policy of Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing: The Closing Session of the Palestine Center Winter Conference ."
Report from a Palestine Center briefing by Jennifer Loewenstein, Gabriel Piterberg, Ilan Pappe, and Amal Jamal

"A Jewish state and a democratic state are fundamentally incompatible. What I would advocate instead is a transformation," explained Jennifer Loewenstein, senior lecturer in Communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The transformation, argued Loewenstein, will depend on the creation of a nationwide anti-apartheid movement that recognizes that the future rests on abandoning the notion of the nation-state. However, she opposes the idea of two states-Palestine and Israel-for the simple fact that the "historical circumstances have rendered a Palestinian state impossible." For there to be peaceful coexistence, argued Loewenstein, it must be based on a democratic, secular state. Furthermore, for Palestinians and Israelis to move forward, there must be an acknowledgement of the "injustice" done to the Palestinians in 1948 when the Jewish state was created. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict began in 1948, explained Loewenstein, when Israel-a colonial state-took land that belonged to another people.

Loewenstein's comments were delivered during the closing session of the 23 January 2003 Palestine Center (Palestine Center) winter conference entitled, "Israel's Policy of Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing." The conference included Palestinian, Israeli, and American speakers: Nur Masalha, senior lecturer and director of Holy Land Research Project at St. Mary's College in the United Kingdom, Ilan Pappe, senior lecturer of Political Science at Haifa University, Gabriel Piterberg, associate professor of Ottoman history at the University of California Los Angeles, Amal Jamal, Tel Aviv University Political Science Lecturer, Stephen Zunes, chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco, Justin Raimondo, senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and journalist and author Lenni Brenner.

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